Mind-Games, Meta Cinema and Self-Allegory: The Case of Inception
Mind-Games, Meta Cinema and Self-Allegory: The Case of Inception

Summary/Abstract: Argo, I am arguing, is not a mind-game film, but plays mind-games with history, as an ideological maneuver that allows Hollywood to celebrate itself, while contributing yet another narrative emplotment to the standard trope of American war films, which is: “let no man be left behind”, i.e. rescue the boys and bring them home. From Rambo to Black Hawk Down, from Apocalypse Now to Saving Private Ryan, the rescue scenario is America’s self-serving representation of what are otherwise (ruinous or failed) invasive military missions (for ‘restoring democracy’). If Saving Private Ryan is a different case – as I try to show in the chapter devoted to the film – it is also because WWII is still considered one of the United States’ honorable and just wars, and because Spielberg’s film questions the very logic of “save and rescue” one (man/cause/community) and not another.

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