The Truth About Steve Bannon
Nothing says more about Steve Bannon than his choice and his analysis of movies. I knew from Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain that Bannon’s favorite movie is Twelve O’Clock High. And when faced with the challenge of interviewing him for my film American Dharma, I thought, Why not put him in his favorite movie—in his favorite military dream? The Quonset hut where Gregory Peck (General Savage) addresses his troops, who are on the verge of mutiny. This is World War II, in the early years of the air war against Nazi Germany. “I don’t have a lot of patience for this ‘What are we fighting for?’ stuff,” Savage says. “We’re in a war. A shooting war. We’ve got to fight … Consider yourselves already dead.”
had been assigned to Bannon’s class at Harvard Business School. General Savage’s exhortation to his troops was taken as an example of. It makes perfect sense in war, but how about in peacetime? I assumed that the winning is for American principles and ideals, but it is unstated. I asked myself, What about the movie tells me that the war is a fight to preserve democracy or even American values? Not much. I couldn’t decide whether I was more horrified by Bannon’s love of the film the idea that it embodied the values being taught at Harvard Business School.
