Left-Wing The Week Praises Ted Cruz for Taking Aim at China-Friendly Hollywood

Left-leaning magazine The Week praised Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday for proposing legislation that would bar the Pentagon from working with movie studios that have recently changed films for Chinese censors, writing that Cruz “has landed on a good idea with the wrong motivations.”

“Under normal circumstances, I tend to disagree with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) about basically everything,” the publication’s culture critic, Jeva Lange, wrote in a column. “But with his latest legislative effort, he might just have my support.”

Lange said the proposal would discourage some of China’s less laudable values from influencing the movie industry and “preserve the integrity” of art, writing, “Pervasive industry-wide beliefs — like that Chinese racism would tank a movie like Black Panther — can paradoxically limit diverse casting in American films that are intended to be overseas hits. Additionally, looking to address the broadest of audiences and governments with a work could only ever produce a bland, boring movie, as opposed to one that actually commits to being about something.

“Discouraging movies from being made solely as vehicles that can get past a foreign government’s censors isn’t just a question of protecting some peachy American ideal about the freedom of speech,” she added. “It’s also about preserving the integrity of what makes art art: a film’s specificity, say, or its ability to illuminate a precise human experience, or the derivation of a story from a particular place and time.”

Cruz’s office said this week that he plans to introduce the Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, and Protecting Talkies Act, or SCRIPT Act, after the Senate reconvenes in May. The bill would require studios seeking the Pentagon’s assistance to provide a list of all the movies they have submitted to Chinese Communist Party officials “for evaluation” over the preceding 10 years, and would limit Pentagon assistance to studios that have altered movies at China’s request.

The legislation comes after controversy involving productions such as the Tom Cruise movie, Top Gun: Maverick, which was produced with assistance from the United States Air Force. Producers removed Taiwanese and Japanese flags that appeared in the 1986 original in order to appease Chinese censors. The movie is tentatively due for release in December.

The Pentagon assisted with 800 films and 1,100 TV titles between 1911 and 2017, and occasionally requests alterations of its own. Lange noted a prominent example includes the 2013 Superman movie Man of Steel, which was initially denied assistance for portraying the American military as too “cartoony.” The department also assisted with The Terminator and Iron Man franchises, but turned down Marvel’s Avengers, because it didn’t understand the movie’s fictional S.H.I.E.L.D. organization.

“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,” Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, told Wired at the time. “To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything.”

China has banned a wide range of American entertainment from appearing in the country, including Winnie the Pooh after Chinese activists began comparing the “Pooh Bear” character to Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping.

Lange said she found it distasteful that Cruz’s measure came in the midst of acrimony over the coronavirus pandemic, but still supports the proposal. “A moral high ground … is not the best way to approach the question of resisting Chinese censorship. Still … for an industry that otherwise lionizes the victims of the Hollywood blacklist, Tinseltown has been pretttty quick to cede free speech to Chinese authorities for the sake of making a buck.

“The SCRIPT Act would require, at the very least, a reevaluation of the purpose of Hollywood movies. And while Ted Cruz and I might not necessarily agree on the why, he’s right: it’s time for Hollywood to decide the worth of its art,” she added.