‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does.

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As the casualty count rose, I kept thinking about all those disability payments we taxpayers would have to pick up.

Now, all of this is harmless nonsense to those of us who understand the hero and villain business, and realize the simplistic bias that permeates Hollywood. But to impressionable audiences, the anti-American theme could resonate.

Apart from the fact that Bill O’Reilly is a half-witted bully and quite probably insane, he resonates strangely with some people doing critical discourse analysis. At the very start of the movement, Hodge and Kress (1979) wrote the following about a mildly right-wind editorial:

"As readers of this editorial we should have to be alert and willing to engage in mental exercise to get beyond the seductive simplicity of the final form, with just three entities, and seemingly precise relations, where everything seems to be there on the surface." ... "few commuters on the 8.05 from Brighton would have the energy to perform the mentail gymnastics required. Especially as they would have to perform them not once, but just about a dozen times on every full line of newsprint that they scan. After all, the crossword is there for mental exercise." (p. 22)

This brings up a crucial question of our individual and collective autonomy of our cognitive system. Only the initiated, one folk theory goes, can truly overcome propaganda (be it political or contained in advertising) while others are completely under the spell of whatever their social and psychological cognition serves up.  But this unwitting agreement of these two forces (mutually recognized as evil) should be enough for us to doubt the ease with which such a theory should be promulgated. There is enough evidence for both easy suggestibility (see Lakoff's 'don't think of an elephant') and remarkable independence (Becker, Gamson). Further investigation is clearly needed.